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TALK; Water World

By Adam Fisher

Published: November 21, 2010

At the government's request, the tribes that populate the remote Indonesian island of Sumba stopped hunting heads in the 1950s. Or at least that was what was supposed to happen. In reality, a head was lopped off in an intratribal war as recently as last March. ''We had to stop sending people on trips to the waterfall for months until things settled down,'' says Claude Graves, one of three Westerners living permanently on the island. Graves and his wife have spent the last 20 years building Nihiwatu, the most exclusive and lavish surf destination in the world. The hideaway resort draws ultrarich, ?-athletic adventurers, who come to test themselves against a legendary wave and to be surrounded by one of the last Stone Age cultures on Earth.

The Dutch, who opened the East Indies in the 1600s to the spice trade, called Sumba ''Sandalwood Island.'' They relinquished control of Indonesia after World War II, and Sumba, isolated on the far end of the archipelago, became Indonesia's wild wild west. Today its few towns are little more than dusty trading posts or missionary settlements, and the majority of the 600,000 citizens live as their ancestors did: in small, widely dispersed villages. When Graves first scouted the beaches, permission to explore came only after negotiation with tribal kings. ''We had an escort of a dozen barefoot porters carrying our equipment,'' Graves remembers. ''When we came to the edge of a tribal boundary, they'd melt back into the jungle and another crew would appear and continue on with their escort.''

Graves and I are taking in the view from the sand-floored pavilion that serves as Nihiwatu's dining room, bar and social center. To the south is a Brobdingnagian set of rocky pinnacles marching into the Indian Ocean. To the north the widest, most immaculate beach I've ever seen stretches for miles, like a bolt of raw silk unspooled between sea and jungle. There's no evidence of human habitation at all, not even footprints in the sand. Graves owns everything within view -- most significantly, the right to surf a large and hollow wave, which peels perfectly and breaks on the reef in front of us. Nihiwatu is home to one of the best surf breaks in Indonesia, maybe even the world.

To surf the break, you need permission from Graves. The fact that he's built a luxury eco-resort right in front of it only makes it more remarkable. And for these sins, Graves is reviled by much of the surf world. ''They say that you can't own the waves in the ocean,'' says Graves, presiding at the bar in board shorts and Vans. ''I never believed that.''

As the beach's owner and benevolent dictator, he's made two rules: There will never be more than 30 outsiders on the property at any one time, and never more than 10 in the water. ''It's going to stay wild,'' Graves says. ''I guarantee you that.''

Graves grew up in the '50s, a surfer on the Jersey Shore. In the '70s, the oil-exploration industry took him to Bali. ''I built the first house on Kuta beach,'' he says, referring to Bali's oldest surfing mecca. ''Back then there was no electricity, no roads, no people in the water, just the rice paddies and me.'' Today Kuta is, according to Graves, ''the Ibiza of South East Asia,'' one giant traffic jam with a techno soundtrack.

So in 1989, Graves abandoned Kuta for Sumba, a island that's a five-day drive from Bali. He calls his first five seasons in Sumba his ''Mosquito Coast'' years. And indeed, he came down with malaria. ''I stopped counting after the 30th time I got sick,'' he says. He, his wife and their newborn baby camped on the beach for those first years while they laid the groundwork for a resort. The first job was to piece together the property through hundreds of land deals, each of which had to be sealed by slitting the throat of a boar. (Graves wielded the knife.) Then came the challenge of building a luxury resort in one of the most remote corners of the world. It took a decade. Making a virtue out of necessity, Nihiwatu is totally off the grid -- and even manages to produce much of its own food, electricity and diesel fuel.

My fellow guests are all from Paris, flown in on a chartered jet from Bali. Among them are a count and countess, an heir to the Herm?name and fortune, a French diplomat, and the artistic director for the fine jewelry division of Louis Vuitton. Their leader is the jeweler, Lorenz B?er.

He's the best surfer of the group, and his home surf break used to be Biarritz, until he discovered Nihiwatu.

B?er and crew begged me to keep their place a secret, because there is every reason to come here. The diving and snorkeling are spectacular, and even tidepooling routinely turns up rarities like the blue-ringed octopus. The fishing is world class and there is plenty to do on land: mountain biking, trekking, yoga, massages.

What makes Nihiwatu distinct from other spectacularly sited luxury resorts, however, starts just outside the front gate. In material terms the natives of the 400 villages that surround the resort are the poorest people in the poorest state in all of Indonesia. Most farmers make do with a Robinson Crusoe level of technology: bamboo pipes funnel water from well to field, and water buffalo hooves serve as plows. Yet by other measures, Sumba is exceedingly rich, and to explore its villages is to witness a culture untouched by modernity.